Abstract
Classical cryptographic protocols based on shared secret keys often are vulnerable to key-guessing attacks. For security, the keys must be strong, difficult to memorize for humans. Bellovin and Merritt [4] proposed “encrypted key exchange” (EKE) protocols, to frustrate key-guessing attacks. EKE requires the use of asymmetric cryptosystems and is based on encrypting the public key, using a symmetric cipher.
In this paper, a novel way of key exchange is presented, where public keys are sent openly, not encrypted. In contrast to EKE protocols, the same public-key/secret-key pair can be used for arbitrary many protocol executions. The RSA-based protocol variant is found to be quite efficient and practical.
Compared to previous work on such protocols, a more solid formal treatment is given, influenced by the work of Bellare and Rogaway [3] on key exchange protocols for strong common secrets.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lucks, S. (1998). Open key exchange: How to defeat dictionary attacks without encrypting public keys. In: Christianson, B., Crispo, B., Lomas, M., Roe, M. (eds) Security Protocols. Security Protocols 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1361. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0028161
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0028161
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